AMCouncil AMBoK Team Member, Martin Kerr, represented the Asset Management Council at the ISO TC251 (ISO5500x) committee meeting in Amersfoort, The Netherlands 22nd to 26th October 2018.

TC251 is a technical committee (TC) that looks after the ISO55xxx suite of documents. The committee is made up of several working groups, one of which is looking at guidance on alignment of asset management, finance and accounting into standard ISO55010 under the auspice of Working Group 5, WG5.

Working Group 5 worked through the feedback received on Committee Draft 2 of ISO 55010 that was circulated after the Paris Meeting in Feb 2018. A final Draft of the ISO55010 document is to be considered in May 2019. The core challenge for WG5 is one of terminology and language. Finance has a language often geared to local accounting standards whereas asset management as it is mostly related to a tangible, physical item, is easier to translate across boundaries.

A goal of WG5 is to promote agnostic and generic themes while at the same time being detailed enough to be purposeful. This balance has been tested by converting English to Chinese and Japanese and the reverse. WG5 believes that if a bidirectional meaning can be achieved then the financial and non-financial alignment proposition can also be achieved.